Sandy no head turner on climate

Wednesday

Oct 31, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Clive McFarlane

Climate change has received no billing in this tightly-contested presidential election, with perhaps the only exception being the time Mitt Romney brought it up at his nomination ceremony to deride President Barack Obama.

The president, Mr. Romney said then, “promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet … My promise is to help you and your family.”

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy along the Eastern seaboard should show us that talking about climate change is not funny in the least.

Nevertheless, if you think the storm will nudge us toward a more sobering perspective on climate change and its impact on the planet, don’t hold your breath.

Professor James Gomes, director of the Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise at Clark University, is, for example, among those pessimistic about Hurricane Sandy creating any groundswell of support for climate change intervention policies.

“It didn’t happen after Katrina and it didn’t happen after Irene,” he said of the potential of extreme weather to change minds. “While there is wide consensus among scientists that global climate change is under way, no one can tie any actual weather action to climate change, and that makes it easier to keep their heads in the sand.”

According to Mr. Gomes, among the adverse effects of climate change, which most scientists believe is caused by human activities, are rising sea levels; increased acidification of the oceans, which impacts sea life and the food chain, and extreme weather — droughts and storms.

And while Americans believe in greenhouse gases and global warming, they are generally resistant to many of the proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, particularly because of the financial costs.

As a result, both political parties tend to believe that talking about climate change loses votes, and thus are more likely to talk about the economic harm of $4-a-gallon gas prices, rather than about devastating impacts climate change can have on the planet.

“Our political leaders are not willing to tell the truth, because the truth is unpopular,” Mr. Gomes said.

But it is not that all politicians are deaf to the clarion call of the scientific community.

Earlier this year, Congressman Ed Markey, noting that Massachusetts loses about 2.8 million square feet of land each year because of rising sea levels, reportedly said global warning was not a distant but an immediate treat to the commonwealth.

When Mr. Obama was running for election in 2008, he referred to the potential impact of climate change as one of the “greatest moral challenges of our generation,” while U.S. Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate that year, called for set limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

However, the tide has changed significantly in this year’s presidential election.

While the president mentioned climate change a number of times throughout his presidency, he has said very little about it since the midterm elections.

His re-election website does not raise the issue, nor does Mr. Romney’s, and it is not being raised on the campaign trail.

Mr. Gomes believes that young people — as they have done in some of the great social changes of our times, whether it was the Civil Rights movement or the war in Vietnam — will have to play the activist role in bringing their parents along when it comes to acting on climate change.

If that is the case, the young certainly have work to do, because while Hurricane Sandy might not change minds, it certainly offers us a glimpse of what is at stake in the battle between forces that would milk the planet for all it’s worth, and those that would try to preserve it for future generations.